Is ‘water’ a quality of water?

An oxymoron expression composed of contradictory or clashing terms. That’s a whole other game. The problem with going about definitions in the way you described is that it defeats the purpose of defining anything.

Dictionary
x: has x-like qualities

What does that tell us about x? Little to nothing. It’s a nonsensical definition. Similarly, saying water has the quality of water isn’t very meaningful.

A floor doesn’t have “floor-like” qualities, it just has qualities. There is nothing about the constituent qualities that is floor-like, yet in combination they create a certain form we call a floor.

What we are able to do is recognize patterns and generalize from them. From a set of specific examples, we abstract a general idea/type/category. Water, tree, yellow, car, etc. You don’t need to suppose special metaphysical qualities for every one of our abstractions. You just need to understand that the foundation of every “type” or abstract idea is a set of instances that can be thought or perceived to share discrete characteristics, qualities, or forms. Given a representation with enough of the right characteristics, we recognize the thing as something we know.

Quality is not a medium. Our body, our senses, our consciousness - these are the mediums through which human experience as we know it is possible. From our experiences, we abstract qualities that allow us to relate and categorize each experience.

[[Wikipedia:
Types and examples

Oxymorons in the narrow sense are a rhetorical device used deliberately by the speaker, and intended to be understood as such by the listener. In a more extended sense, the term “oxymoron” has also been applied to inadvertent or incidential contradictions, as in the case of “dead metaphors” (“barely clothed”, “terribly good”). Lederer (1990), in the spirit of “recreational linguistics”, goes as far as to construct “logological oxymorons” such as reading the word nook as composed of “no” and “ok” or the surname Noyes as composed of “no” plus “yes”, or far-fetched punning such as “divorce court” or “press release”.[6] There are a number of single-word oxymorons built from “dependent morphemes”[6] (i.e. no longer a productive compound in English, but loaned as a compound from a different language), as with pre-posterous (lit. “with the hinder part before”, compare husteron proteron, “upside-down”, “head over heels”, ass-backwards" etc.)[7] or sopho-more (an artificial Greek compound, lit. “wise-foolish”).]]

I guess my constraints of the English language are more broader and less rigid than yours… I do tend to use my language in a very creative way, and the UK English language curriculum has always allowed for that.

What differentiates a picture frame from a flatscreen TV, a floor from a ceiling or wall?

But I would say that water having water-like qualities is helpful in differentiating it from, say… clear gelo.

Then why do we not call a floor a ceiling or wall? because what makes a floor floor-like is that it is always below us, as opposed to a ceiling or wall… such miss-labellings are made by children… until they learn otherwise.

It is the thing passed between two or more different other things, like different objects have the quality of colour. For example light and brains computers etc. That’s a medium.

Get past the terms and simply ask; what is colour? In all instances. it is not a problem in language or definition, its a problem that our scientific understanding can’t tell us what colour is.

Water certainly has a ‘quality’ that humans lack … water follows the laws of nature. When it gets cold enough water freezes … when it gets hot enough water boils … and most importantly … water never attempts to flow uphill … ergo: fight the laws of gravity.

Hopefully, the day will come when humans adopt this particular ‘quality’ of water.

. web.uri.edu/iaics/files/09-Guo-M … d-Holt.pdf

Man defies gravity … ain’t it wonderful!!

Man Defies Gravity.jpg

Not sure that’s the case. Also not sure how “defining an object by what that object is” could be an oxymoron, but I’m interested to hear how you’re thinking about it.

It would only be helpful if you described what those “water-like qualities” are. The term water-like is just a form of imprecise and circular short-hand that doesn’t really mean anything.

The answer to this was included in what I said before. Because there are a combination of qualities and contexts which together have a particular meaning to us - that of a floor. The concept of a floor is ours. A floor is not floor-like, it is a floor, because we recognize its qualities and context.

And humans have a nature of their own, which drives their behavior nonetheless.

That’s pretty vague to me. If I seem obtuse about language it’s because countless discussions have gone around in circles because no one really knows or clarifies what the other person is saying.

Can you explain more about what the deal is with color? Do you have a source for this problem that I could look into?

An object (or substance) is not a quality. And a quality is not an object. EOS.

Fuse

That’s fair enough, but it will be vague when no-one has answers yet. I do struggle to explain e.g. what color/light is in my brain e.g. in dreams, especially when it is not light. Or like the example I gave; have you seen optical illusions where a guy has an image on a board, then moves one piece and now you see it as a different colour. Now I get that the brain can do graphics like computers can, but unless it can produce light internally much like pixels on a monitor, then I don’t know how it is producing colour.

The deeper problem is then asking what colour is in the mind or the world, how do transparent photons make coloured light? I assume something happens when they interact e.g. on water particles in a rainbow, but we are still pulling colour out of our asses - so to speak. There is a quality of ‘colour’ that happens, same in the mind.

I understand that cells produce photons, that the brain is making light, but what and where is the screen. How can the brain be seeing photons inside cells all at once to make the full image of what we see.

They do not produce light. A “photon” is merely a small puff of EMR energy, not necessarily associated with visible light. The energy is picked up on EEGs.

So it is with a whole host of human experience. Color is a subjective experience of an objective phenomenon. There is a spectrum of light of differing wavelengths. Our experience of color is fundamentally mediated by our sensory systems’ representation of external stimuli, and then again when the mind interprets the sense data.

We can never really know anything apart from how the mind and the sensory systems package it for us. And the packaging differs from person to person. I think at best we have the ability to “sufficiently know things,” to understand the limits of our perception, and to recognize that there’s more to the story. I’ve never found the premise of science to be at odds with this.

I’m more intrigued by the ‘why’… why are we able to manipulate the effect that light has on the chemical compounds in objects, enabling us to see various colours… along with other creatures.

If we classified colour (I’m not sure if it already is) perhaps that would aid understanding of what colour actually is. I would say it’s an element.

Regarding the UK English language curriculum allowing for a more expressive use of language?

I’m guessing you’ve never heard of a Creative Writing course module?

I was thinking that it could be perceived as such…

Yes… to children! Adults would already have this information to hand, so when we mention water-like, it’s qualities should automatically come to mind.

So when we say something has a scissor-like action it is incomprehensible to us?

A peach is nectarine-like, but it is not a nectarine, but I have seen some that were very nectarine-like… right down to the smoother skin - I could not differentiate the two, because they both looked nectarine-like/like nectarines.

Yes… because, as mentioned above, it’s qualities come to mind. We seem to agree on that aspect.

ok, so what is colour in the brain then? more to the point about water, how can we think about something like the qualities, water, colour, heat, smell. heat for example is merely a measure of the vibrations of particles, but we feel the quality of heat.

Not sure that what’s going on in this convo has to do with having a more or less expressive use of language lol

How’s that?

Sure, but this is getting far afield of the point: what is a water-like quality, and does water have a ‘water’ quality?

That’s not what I meant. “Scissor-like action” is short-hand for a set of qualities that people are presumably already familiar with. It doesn’t mean anything apart from the idea of scissors. That is to say, scissors are not scissors because of some ‘scissor quality’ that already existed.

Color is not in the brain. The brain contains electrochemical pulses that have been triggered by stimuli. When external light is the stimulus that triggered some of the electrochemical pulses, the brain deduces that there is light “out there” somewhere. Different light triggers different pulses and the brain distinguishes them with the idea of “color”. The same kind of thing is true for all of the other senses.

We say that the apple “has redness” or “is red” when we mean that the light reflecting off of the apple triggers the particular electrochemical pulses that we associate with “red” light. We could have called it “mergoin colored light”. We merely mean that the light coming from the apple is of a specific type out of many other possible types. We learn to call it “red” so as to communicate the sensation to others.

We give names to different affects upon our senses for sake of communication. The affect that water has upon our senses is what we call “wetness”. Because all or at least most water triggers that same affect upon us, we categorize wetness as a “quality” of water in the same way that we categorize color as a quality of certain apples.

The quality of a thing tells us what affect to expect from that thing. The quality is not the thing itself, but rather an affect stemming from it. That is just the way the language works.

That would mean we are not actually seeing it?

This question kind of boggles my mind, amorphos.

I think that you would necessarily have to ask yourself under what appearance or guise something is.

If you ask the questions ~~

IS ice a quality of water
Is a snowflake a quality of water
is the morning dew a quality of water, et cetera

that gives more clarity to the image.

Can something actually be a quality of itself or can it only point to or reveal in some way what its qualities consist of?
You look into the surface of a river on a clear day and you can see your image. Is that river your image or does it simply reflect or point to some quality of itself ~~ in this case, a mirror-like quality under certain circumstances? Perhaps not a good analogy.